Today, we’re excited to announce that ThousandEyes is joining forces with the Cisco Catalyst 9000 family of switches to bring Internet and Cloud Intelligence to tens of thousands of organizations around the world, enabling them to see and manage networks and applications that they rely on but do not directly own or control. By bundling ThousandEyes with its most widely deployed switches for campus and branch environments, Cisco is solving a critical visibility gap for enterprises, who are increasingly leveraging cloud, Internet and SaaS to deliver digital services to its employees and internal systems.
Cisco Catalyst 9300/9400 switches with a DNA Advantage license can now serve as a vantage point for enterprises to gain a 360-degree view of campus service delivery—with no need to deploy additional hardware or purchase a separate software license.
Why Visibility Off Campus is Critical to On Campus Service Delivery
Today’s campus environments are deeply interconnected with SaaS applications, cloud-based services and many service providers across the global Internet. Every day, users access externally hosted applications over hundreds of networks outside of your control. You may not own these networks, but you still own service delivery outcomes—outcomes that can be impossible to influence when you have no visibility outside the campus. When users inevitably experience poor performance or service disruptions, it can take hours or even days to determine if the problem is your network, someone else’s network, or the application.
Traditional network management tools, such as flow, packet capture, and SNMP, can provide visibility into your own network, but they leave you blind to the many external dependencies (such as ISP and cloud networks) that impact user digital experience. While internal visibility will continue to play an important role in managing service delivery, it is no longer sufficient on its own. In today’s IT environment, meeting network SLAs and ensuring seamless delivery of services on campus, also requires visibility off campus—from switch to SaaS, and everything in between, including every network hop in the service delivery path.
ThousandEyes for Campus Service Assurance
Leveraging ThousandEyes with the Catalyst 9000, organizations can proactively gain insight into the performance of SaaS and other apps and services accessed over the Internet and cloud network and rapidly pinpoint where problems are occurring—and who is responsible—so they can resolve or escalate issues before they impact the business.
Catalyst 9000 customers can use ThousandEyes to:
- Ensure the reachability of SaaS, cloud-based services, and enterprise endpoints over any network
- Proactively monitor SD-WAN overlays, hop-by-hop underlay, ISP performance, and Internet routing
- Validate app performance and usability down to campus user segments
By gaining end-to-end visibility from campus/branch users to apps and services accessed over Internet and cloud networks, enterprises can dramatically reduce MTTI/MTTR, gain successful escalations with providers, and better manage OLAs/SLAs.
How Does the Integration Work?
Starting April 5th, 2021, Cisco Catalyst 9300/9400 customers with a DNA Advantage subscription will have the ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent natively supported. Please see this guide for more information about the free Cisco ThousandEyes entitlements that come with your Cisco Catalyst 9300 or 9400 Series Cisco DNA Advantage subscription.
How Do I Get Started?
All Catalyst 9300/9400 switches purchased with a DNA Advantage license after April 5th, 2021, will have the ThousandEyes agent embedded on the switch and can automatically have test entitlements provisioned in either an existing account (current ThousandEyes customer) or a newly activated ThousandEyes account.
Current Cisco Catalyst 9000 customers who qualify for ThousandEyes access as part of their DNA Advantage license, will need to update their switches to the latest IOS XE version and accept their ThousandEyes entitlement in Cisco Smart Software Manager.
Watch this video for step-by-step instructions on ThousandEyes agent installation via DNA Center. Learn more on how to get started with ThousandEyes here.
Lighting the Path from Campus to Cloud
Sometime, in the not-too-distant future, users currently working from home will start returning to campus and branch environments (at least partially), and when they do, they will be coming back to a workplace that is even more dependent on cloud and SaaS than it ever was (even just a year ago). The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud and SaaS for many organizations, and new safety protocols will introduce more Internet-connected smart devices into the mix. The result is enterprise sites are more dependent on off-campus infrastructure, apps, and services than ever before. ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence for the Catalyst 9000 will deliver critical visibility and actionable insights to organizations so they can take back control of their experience of external dependencies they don’t own and, ultimately, thrive in a connected world.